


Gathering Orchids

by mylk (thequirkyduckling)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Eventual Hermione Granger/Severus Snape, F/M, Humor, Lemon, Mean Severus Snape, OTP Feels, Prostitution, Sex Cult, Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 10:51:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12910377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequirkyduckling/pseuds/mylk
Summary: When Hermione becomes fed up with her life,  she leaves Britain on hiatus with no intention of ever returning.  All of her peers think that it is completely nutters to believe that proper and uptightMiss Grangerwould actually, truly have designs to join a sex cult.She never considers their comments to hold any merit until she catches sight of a wizard, a wizard that by all evidence should bevery, verydead.   He is holding her gaze with no duplicated surprise of his own, only resigned hardiness, his ticket ribboned for the same destination as hers.Spain, Cantabira.  The Velvet Fang. Est. 1499 AD





	Gathering Orchids

_2005, June._

Hermione scrambled to find the small weasel-shaped bottle of breath freshener from within the crypts of thumb-worn, ink-crinkled scrolls, dozens—no, hundreds—of her failed and promptly rejected manifestos. Snape’s gutting scarlet ink held no candle to the Ministries black rejection seal. She rummaged through a few more stacks, bumping a column of papers into a redeployment charm, shooting like cards into a paper bin on the other side of the room. 

She lifts a dog-eared tome, The Sexual Crusades and tried not to make note of the way the book creaked sadly from her overuse. Or to the splotches, those sad ria coastlines of spilled cheap wine staining the pages. There was still saran from a slice of rum cake from the last New Year party wedged between two paper mountains of washout letters. And sprinkles… too many damnable sprinkles. 

The dossiers sitting atop her spinet made a sizable plinth beneath her cold cuppa and lunches drowned tomatoes. She moved over there like a wraith. Two sad pouches of hematoma blue bagged under meek, watery eyes. Her fingernails bitten down to the nub. Left ring finger marked with the remnants of some curse stigmata, the spidery scar smooth and shiny as an Occamy egg.

It had taken too much magic to rid herself of Ron’s ring and the _bind._

Her once creamy skin had started to show the fine lines of her stress and age, lentigo edging in from her hairline. The tortoise shell coloring of her hair finally grading properly on her sun-kissed looks. She could be pretty if she bothered to try anymore. Yet she preferred the used look, burning in smoke—she wanted to look hard and knackered. Hold the grossness in her teeth like an offending vegetable and revel in self-punishment. 

Her head was ringing as she staggered with a foul taste in her mouth, eyes burning from the tissue she kept scraping against them. 

Her queasy stomach had had her vomiting all morning inside the Muggle Relations Office's lav until Ms. Macra and her skinny little legs had started kicking the door with all the ferocity of a bush cricket. Splitting the seams of her skirt in a private meeting with the newly appointed magistrate, making a right fool of herself and losing her promotion for the umpteenth, did not inspire a single drop of mercy from old, Ms. Macra and her arse-tight daily docket.

_The bridge troll._

She had made sure to leave the seat up. The bog roll empty. And for good measure, sat an extra five minutes in the stall waiting for Macra’s diuretic pills to kick in from all the excitement. With a shout, Hermione pried her little prize from the slackened book-spine of a New Age Magical Enhancement’s text and downed it all in the next breath. 

Ugh. She needed that. She licked her lips and winced. 

Next, she sifted through the powdered contents of her clutch and found some antacids to stifle her nervous stomach.

She chewed them furiously, white foaming at the edges of her mouth, nostrils puffing. 

She was going to quit. _Yes, yes, yes._

It would be best to look rabid when she dove for Shacklebolt’s lapels and demanded her freedom. Her knees were already knocking together in fear, she would be unable to launch herself at his feet seconds later and beg for her job back afterward. She needed to quit. Because this… this was ridiculous. 

“No, take backs, old gal.” She muttered to herself, chewing her lip. Her life after the war, once so immaculate, cut and clear and planned, concerted so foolishly—shackled her down to her career. This pathetic, once so perfect job. Her life now, held no room for relations, no backrooms for family, no money for frivolity and certainly nothing for her vaults. Hermione whined, she had traded in the lock and key and ring of a bucolic Weasley life for this… Something she never wanted but craved. She scrubbed her hands against her puffed eyes and looked upon the shrinking office that once held and soothed every chamber of her heart and mind. It was cramped and tight and smelly as a crab shell with all the appeal of having a spider stuck in your hair. 

The plumbing room to the entire Ministry of Magic was located all around her, flushes happened in pin-striking seconds, roaring waters twisting down narrow horn-shaped pipes into the wells, causing the magical furnaces to roar right back. Hermione had the distinct impression of being caught between two fighting lions. That happened every eleven minutes and forty-four seconds. 

She really started to loathe Gryffindor icons. 

The boiler room and her offices were damp most of the time and unusably chilly. The constant warming spells she placed had a nasty habit of being sucked through the ashlar, robbed by the enchanted steamers used by the launderer elves. Her weary eyes flicked to the tinkling noise of the pipes above her, Luna would say it was the flatulence of a Nargle bloated on fermented mildew making the light sounds.

Hermione ignored the thought sorrowfully, she never spoke to Luna anymore. Her attention focused instead on the beach-colored burnish of her discarded shoes.

Sitting precariously atop a cabinet disused were her Pigalle heels, purchased from Muggle London when she was still dating Ron. 

A blasted engagement gift…

They sat like a gargoyle watching her, leathery skin untouched by the flooding waters that would rush through her office every time the third stall of the Department of Magical Transportation lavatory punched into another aquatic realm. She still had sucker scars on her left ankle from the last swamping. She had spent months, years here really. This position was made for her, manifested by the Ministry’s new platform. Hermione plucked an old copy of the Daily Prophet into her hands, adjusting her bottle-spectacles.

**Muggle Fellowship!**

**Ministry aspires for sodality with the Muggle-world, fears discord of martial UK.**

With a tempestuous huff, she flung the article carelessly across the Sheraton spires, hiking her feet onto her desk, sinking deep into her seat with a frustrated groan. This was the exact tosh that had given Voldermort his kindling. An angry whistle broke through the chip in her front teeth, a keepsake from Vincent Crabbe. If the git hadn’t been so intent on flattening her face, the fiendfyre would not have frenzied out of control, feeding off his bloodlust and ultimately killing him.

Five months into this job, that was as far as her progression got before stalling for the next five years. She pinched her eyes shut, lip wobbling.

Her findings were conclusive and disheartening. Muggles were horrid with magical influence and wizards were obstinate to any route without magic.

It was an ugly ouroboros. Hermione had broken in too many Obliviators the past few years to clean the messes she made. She was far too familiar with the department and the men. 

They bought her pints on Fridays. She sometimes unclenched enough to take one home. It was always the same type, dark and mysterious, brooding but not ballsy nor stupid enough to be an Auror. 

She avoided the ones with lopsided smiles and the younger. She would always offer them a glass of brandy that she never touched, a gift from the Order of Merlin jubilee. They would never accept it, politely most of the time. And afterward, ceremoniously she would awake to the moonlight with dreams of nightjars keening from black thatches of wood, never to fly and thus reveal themselves. Stirred from uneasy rest, her lover would deviate to the edge of her bed in his sleep and she would fear to touch his skin to find him real. Her hand would hover before tucking back under her cheek—some nights, so afflicted with troubled dreams and wretched malcontentments, she would flee from her own chambers, find a book and pray for her visitor’s continued deep sleep.

She could never read a single word on the page, senseless and heavy-hearted, waiting for the morning light to pierce her wretchedness.  
It was in this abeyance, the brink of her nightmares starting to thaw like hoar from the sunlit rooftop that she would find herself in reflection to the nightjar’s cry. How awfully familiar it sounded and to why it tore at her chest, hollowing and deadening every happy thought or feeling like a dementor’s kiss. But this one memory, just there at the spark of dawn would placate her rippling thoughts when the screaming of the birds rose to its crescendo.

All would fall silent as if her head had been submerged underwater and finally, the clear thought would creep in. It was truly the oddest thing to think of Severus Snape and how he got the best of them and be mollified by his disappearance rather than disquieted like the rest of them.  
And to have this precious thought, strange as it was, become her despairs pacifier was equally provoking. Hermione suspected her conflicted feelings were entrenched by her belief that Snape’s vanishing wasn’t criminal in nature like the Auror department suspected or Harry regaled with venom. But rather a disappearing act, a magician’s hat trick, something overlooked. There was no evidence of this, only mounting proof that somehow three or more surviving Death Eater’s had broken into St. Mungo’s in the early hours of August 98’, overpowering and obliviating four matrons and two patients, before having dragged off a stuporous, defenseless, medically fragile Snape and to whatever they did, left no body to be discovered. 

She had grieved for a long time after that, not because she was in any way close to her professor or that she felt a kinship because she had merely known him from her childhood. 

He was supposed to be safe…she had promised it to him, with her fingers woven around his jugular and his brimming blood pacting her vow. She had sworn it, spat it. His quiet eyes nearly swallowing her as the Shrieking Shack reddened. She had felt ebullient fury, Snape had survived so much worse…to only be snatched away in the night and likely murdered in the most undignified way. Vegetized and unable to fight. It cut into her to think of it. 

Left her awake most nights, startled at the ghostly blood-leeched face of her professor glaring at her from the shadows of her flat, sneering and croaking out from jagged bloody teeth, “Look at me now”—only to vanish from her sight when she nearly pissed herself, spitting out a _lumos_ so bright that it burnt her hair.

Her heart had broiled with anger and sadness for a long time, the unfairness, the malfeasance that he had been taken from under their care. That he had been recovering, that he was supposed to be okay, that Harry was again left without any living connection to his parents. 

Yet, she had always this inkling that Snape could be alive. A bizarre hope at first… that perhaps he decided to live his life out as a dark wizard, and that his comrades—those he had enough of a sway over had been there to retrieved him. This was unlikely after more thought. The pensive memories spoke rightly against it.

So, she had thought that maybe he had regained enough strength to fight them off. This too was unlikely. He had been too weak the last she had heard Poppy report, lethargic and confined to bed rest. His magic banked and refusing to relight to its usual wrath. Nagini’s venom still tendrilled around his vessels, fevering his magic to an uncertain, thready pulse.

He had simply been too weak to put up a considerable fight against multiple attackers.

That had brought her to her last idea, the last stronghold of her hope. It had all been an illusion, there were no death eater’s and Snape had simply walked out and performed memory charms on those who had impeded his escape.

It didn’t explain how he managed to pull himself together and perform any magic beyond lighting a wick. But it did match up to the torpor symptoms all the witnesses suffered days afterward. 

August 98’, the 11th day, right down to the exact minute had been the same time that Headmaster Dumbledore had stumbled into the hearth of Grimmauld Place wickedly wet from the summer downpour and obviously well-cared for if the sudden paunch he developed during death was any indicator. Hermione mused, if anything could arouse Professor Snape from his catatonia, it was the return of someone he blasted dead, hexed arse over tit. Dumbledore had a way of moving mountains and making deals that could green the devil with envy. He was a proper person to run from if you had thrown a hex at, much less had been vowed to kill. 

Still Snape was no coward, staring down the gimlet eye of someone he put to death would not be enough to have him turn tail… But she suspected that fame could. He would be regaled and honored and glorified for the rest of his days as the one who deceived the Dark Lord, tricked him into believing that he had murdered the most powerful wizard in the world and had hand in bringing said wizard back from the clutches of death itself. 

If his laud of being a double-spy was hard enough for the Potion’s Master to stomach, then surely such a heroic development would be disastrous.

Hermione wasn’t sure, but she had also gotten the impression from the resurrected Headmaster that he hadn’t expected his spy to have survived the second war. Albus wasn’t pleased with this. Harry didn’t notice it, in fact, only she had. After a lifetime of needing to impress her superiors, her teachers, she had become sensitive to impressions and empathic to a fault. The fine needle hair of her impressibility had jumped and had caused her to look deeper into the sagely face of the Headmaster that day. 

There had been no twinkling in his eyes when Harry had announced the St. Mungo’s tragedy at a meeting with all the remaining order members.

Everyone had looked to the Headmaster for solace. But his gaze… it had chilled her.

His eyes had just been flat blue—two chips of dirty ice. 

His mouth straight-lined clucked with a spiritual gassiness that had her gut twisting in horror, just knowing that the Headmaster was devil-may-care to the news of Snape’s untimely and rather horrifying murder had disgusted her. Whatever shard of respect, any childlike innocence inside her had vaporized in that moment. 

Dumbledore had suggested this job for her. Going far enough to persuade the private interests of the Ministry Board to take her into the Muggle Relations Offices. It had felt deshelving as if she were nothing more than a problemed pet dumped on a strange street. 

Molly had been jubilant, "It's the most perfect job for a _starting family."_

Of course, who wouldn't have thought that good old Muggleborn Hermione Granger would not in every sense enjoy a muggle concomitant job?She was too anal-retentive for anything wizardly serious, so why not this? She was the lady with fire in her eyes, steam engines between her ears, a writhing bushel of mad hair—the most talented witch of her age. 

She was the perfect bitch for the team, the lead dog that would chew at her bits, bald her arse, all flying tits and clacking toenails and high yipping. Hell. Right about now she would drive herself off a cliff following a tantalizing scent, a lead, anything.

So, that was why—coveted so close to her breasts, wedged inside her brassiere, there was the ribboned ticket. _A golden cord._

The ticket she could not afford until she worked for four more years, but had bought anyway. She had lost her flat. Those damned skimpy shoes the most expensive thing she now owned, besides this little slip of paper she traced over her heart. 

The ticket that would spell away this misery. 

The ticket that would rectify her spinster days. 

The ticket to a new life, a family, a place to lick her wounded pride. Her heart clenched. 

A place to belong and give her worth and have undeniable proof of it. 

She let out a meditating sigh, the hard shell of pomade in her hair crackling as she interlaced her fingers behind her head. Her chest lightening, gut bubbling. She was heading for The Velvet Fang. A witch commune, a bower of study and seclusion and unrestrained, gung-ho sex. 

She lifted the scroll under her nose, the pages soaked in Armortentia. Her smile spreading, _vetiver and patchouli._

Her Patronus circled into the room suddenly, escorting in the catamount body of Kingsley’s own Patronus alongside. Her brief happy feelings leaving with the fizzle of her otter. 

 

“I can tell what your thinking by the way you arrange the clothes on your bed, Mione.” Ron frowned, a rare line of concern forming between his eyes, “But I have never seen this…”

She regarded her ex-fiancé as he poked his wand at the peach negligee folded on the bedspread next to a pair of fleece pants, a bright windbreaker and a second-hand pair of snake boots. Hermione snatched the slip away, “It will be a long trip. I won’t need it anyway.”

“Ah, yes, that’s good anyway.” Ron rubbed his furred jaw, suddenly embarrassed. “Still not going to tell us where?”

Hermione sighed, turning back to her packing, “Nope.” 

“You’re going to come back, soon right?” Hermione felt her chest tighten with warm concern at his hopeful words, only to have it release as soon as he spoke again. 

“Luna will have the baby in the spring… I would like you to be here, so would Harry.” He sipped longingly at his tea, his boots were still on.  
His coat was hung up on the door rack on the only hook she left bare when he wasn’t here. It was closest to the exit. 

She snapped her trunk shut with a flick of her wand, heading for the door, “Owl me a postcard. Tyto will find me.”

Ron snatched her wrist before she could escape, his hand still warm from the cup. His voice was emotional filled, so wretched. “What am I supposed to do without you?”

She turned to him with starless eyes, her voice icy. “Go home to your wife and be a good father.”

He yanked her towards him, forcibly crushing her against his chest. He reeked of galbanum and bitter ales, “That doesn’t matter. I don’t love her.” 

“But you don’t love me, Ron.” She reminded him, her voice resigned and so very tired. 

He gave a small shrug, his hands reaching under her pullover to scratch at her teat. “I used too. That’s better than nothing.”

She stopped his hands from sliding further up, “I’m done. I’m moving. I’m not doing this anymore.” She shoved him away growing more irritated, hissing, “And, so what?! You want me to stay here, so you can shag me when you get tired of changing nappies, is that it? I want a family of my own, Ronald.”

He set his mug down, kicking off his boots angrily. He looked completely petulant. Still, she was thankful that he didn’t talk to her about her loss of employment, nor why she cried every time he fucked her. He just held her and let her pine over both their shares to a lifetime of troubles. Ron liked to think as little as possible. 

He was nothing next to her, not a father, not a husband. He had always been nothing to her. She could see the appeal. 

His body too heavy on her hip, she needed to piss, her hair knotted at the back of her neck, his punctilious breath so light she could pretend that he was sleeping. It was better than saying goodbye she concluded when Ron refused to stir, her head light as the dawn she crept out to meet.

**Author's Note:**

> Forgive me for any mistakes, no beta as of yet. This is a break-from-seriousness-piece very different from all the other stories I'm currently working on. 
> 
> Please leave reviews! Everything is appreciated. 
> 
> Hehe. _The Velvet Fang_ ;)
> 
> Snape is coming in the next chapter. _Update_ , I'm hoping to have the next chapter up by the new year.


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